Not My Anything
The rock goblin was waiting for him outside the greenhouse when Nathaniel awoke the next day.
“Get out of here,” Nathaniel told him, shooing with his hands. The gemstone in the little goblin’s chest caught the light as he cocked his head at Nathaniel, but he—Violet was calling him Peri—did not move. “Shouldn’t you be with the rest of your slide?”
He’d woken twice in the night to check on the blighted spot in the Green, and both times, he’d found the slide of rock goblins still at their post, no sign of the rot outside their tight wall.
He’d gone back to bed both times with a frown as he clocked the troubled sounds of his neighbor, clearly in the throes of nightmares, on the other side of the wall.
How did the woman manage to look so bright-eyed each morning if she was up half the night tossing and turning?
Nathaniel, on the other hand, had been bereft of any dreams of his own lately. He was less thankful for that fact than he’d wish.
He narrowed his eyes and warned the goblin, “If you turn any of my belongings to stone, I’ll…”
He didn’t know what. No one knew how to harm a rock goblin. They were simply pests to be lived with.
“Stay out here,” he told the goblin finally, feeling strangely defeated by the one-sided exchange. He opened the door to the greenhouse and slipped inside like Peri was a cat that would steal past his feet, but the goblin made only a croaking sound and stared at him, motionless.
Inside the greenhouse, he stepped up to the large glass box he’d erected on his desk and plucked a leaf from his mint plant, chewing it thoughtfully as he put on a pair of thick gloves.
He opened the two arm-sized holes in the side of the box and slipped his hands through to where a small cauldron simmered above a vibrant pink alchemical flame.
Nathaniel wrinkled his nose as the smell reached him—no doubt he’d be hearing about it from Violet, but such was the nature of his science.
He tied a handkerchief around his nose and mouth, then got to work.
Nathaniel had already tested the substance for organic properties and found it entirely changed.
Although it had undoubtedly begun life as a patch of grass in the Green, it no longer had any chemical resemblance to plant matter.
He knew of several alchemical processes that could do this—turning a flower to glass or gold was a staple of the industry, after all, and people paid good money for it, frivolous as it was—and a few others that worked in the opposite direction, but none of his experiments last night had made the spot of black goo so much as jiggle.
He’d hoped the morning would bring some speck of inspiration, but he stood now, scratching his head, and wishing desperately for a pot of tea.
“Knock, knock,” said a familiar voice. Pru slipped into the greenhouse, a steaming ceramic mug in her hand.
“That was perfect timing,” he told her. “I was just about to go inside and put the kettle on.”
“Call it twin intuition,” she said with a wink.
Twintuition, he mused but did not say, though the sparkle of her smirk told him she guessed at his thoughts anyway. Pru set down the mug and jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the door. “You know that rock goblin is outside your workroom, yes?”
“I can’t get him to leave,” said Nathaniel, removing his gloves so he could touch the tea with clean hands. “But seeing as the rest of his slide is currently doing us a favor, I’m inclined to look the other way.”
Pru leaned against the edge of his desk, eyeing the glass box with curiosity. “That’s probably wise. Maybe they’ll get attached to you and leave me alone.”
Nathaniel scoffed, his eyes still on his experiment. “I wouldn’t want to take that away from you.”
“How very kind,” she responded dryly. Pru followed his gaze. “Any luck reversing it?”
“Not even a little.” Nathaniel shook his head.
“Why don’t you ask Violet?”
“What on earth could she do? She’s not trained in alchemy.”
“Right, but she’s your—”
Something akin to panic jarred him. “She’s not my anything.”
“We’ll definitely return to discuss that tone in your voice,” said Pru, her eyes bright with laughter. “What I was trying to say is she’s your best resource when it comes to plant magic. Perhaps the solution is somewhere between your two areas of expertise.”
Heat crept up his neck. “Ah.”
“But since she’s not your anything, I suppose—”
“Prudence,” he warned.
“Nathaniel,” she teased back, her smile only growing. He knew he’d stepped in it now. She’d never let this go.
Ignoring her smirk, he said, “I’m not entirely certain what she’s capable of or if her magic will be of any help.”
“Why not?”
“I ran some tests on some herbs she conjured for me before any of this business began to see if we could use them in the shop, and while they’re certainly plants, at least to an extent, they’re also…not. They’re somewhere in between.”
Even as he spoke, Nathaniel was already snatching the bundle of mugwort Violet had given him.
He laid it on the glass surface, then dipped a metal stylus into the blighted goo and carefully transferred it to the mugwort.
The rot pulsed slightly, just as it had with his other experiments, and began to spread to the rest of the plant… but then it stopped.
Pru hmmed thoughtfully. “So her plants are resistant to the blight?”
“The magic she used to make them resists the blight,” Nathaniel corrected.
She nodded seriously. “Ah, yes. A distinction I definitely understand without any further explanation.”
He threw his sister a look, which she caught and threw right back.
“If her magic resists the blight, wouldn’t it be a good starting point for reversing it?”
Nathaniel squirmed at the thought, suddenly uncomfortable. “I don’t know.”
“Well, we could always ask her,” said Pru reasonably, though of course she had to add, “Even though she’s not your anything.”
“Prudence,” he warned, groaning. “Please. I’ll ask Violet, but I’m begging you, don’t—”
“Ask Violet what?” said the witch herself from the doorway of the greenhouse. Her face brightened when she noticed his sister. “Pru! What brings you here?”
Nathaniel felt a twinge of something at the realization that Violet never smiled like that at him.
“Just watching my brother fuss over his chemistry set.”
“Alchemy,” corrected Nathaniel automatically, which only made Pru cackle. He was determined to make himself the butt of her teasing today, it seemed.
Violet turned her attention to him, and that, for some reason, was worse. Her scrutiny was a flame to the cauldron of his nerves. She scanned his setup and then, worse, his face and asked with genuine curiosity, “Can you explain to me what you’re doing?”
It was the exact right thing to say. Nathaniel relaxed and launched into teaching mode.
“Alchemy is all about balance. It’s about knowing your intention for the result and creating magical parity with what you put into it.
Turning a substance to gold, for example, is one of the most common understandings of what alchemy is, but actually achieving it means using gold—the desired end result—as a focal parity, or centering force.
If I wanted to turn this leather glove into gold, for example, I’d have to combine it with a substance that is, to say, more gold than gold just as much as the leather is less gold than gold. ”
He could see from both Violet’s and Pru’s expressions that he’d lost them, and he pulled his brass scales to the front of his worktable.
“It’s a puzzle. If the blight is on one side”—he pressed his finger to one of the scale’s bowls, weighing it down—“and a healthy plant is the result we want, then to cancel out the blight I need to find the exact mix of ingredients that forms its alchemical opposite.” He put another finger on the other bowl until they evened out.
“That, along with some magical and alchemical techniques, will serve as the basis of the solution.”
“It’s as simple as that?”
He barked out a laugh. “Insofar as it’s the foundation of the science, yes.
But alchemy requires delicate precision, and often finding the balance means accounting for components and details you can’t see from the start.
” The sound of Pru pretending to snore drew his attention.
His face heated, embarrassed. “Sorry. I have a tendency to lecture, as Pru is quick to remind me.”
“I don’t mind it.” The softness in Violet’s tone surprised him. “Where I come from, people wielded knowledge like an advantage. You had to figure it all out on your own or appear weak. I’m, ah, I’m not used to someone being kind enough to explain things to me when I don’t know them.”
If he could have dived into the pleasure that filled him then and swum in it like a pool, he might never have stepped foot on dry land again.
He was so used to being ridiculed, even teasingly, for the way he talked about his passions.
But the waters tinged with sadness as the rest of her words caught up to him.
Where did she come from? he wondered for the thousandth time.
“Yet another reason you should use Violet’s plants to help,” Pru interjected. “She’s not bored to tears by you answering questions with a whole sermon!”
“Ah.” Violet’s eyes found Nathaniel’s again, sparkling with mirth. “So you’re saying you might find my plants useful.”
Her A-frame sign today took on new meaning as he recalled his own words. “That was not intended to—”
She flapped a hand, waving him off. “I’m only teasing. You don’t have to fill your shop with my flowers or wake up to them on your bedside table.”
This was the part where an apology was required of him, but Nathaniel was distracted by the image she’d painted. Waking up to her flowers on his bedside table, opening his eyes each morning to something she’d crafted from her magic and touched with her clever fingers.
He’d never considered how intimate her work could be.